ISD Digital Skills Development has released new dates for the summer term.  As usual, we are offering a wide range of courses covering Excel, Matlab, LaTeX, Photoshop and more.

As well as the popular Introduction to R we also have courses in data visualisation and manipulation in R.  Our new Reproducible Research series consists of three lunchtime sessions and will demonstrate how to use R, Git, Markdown and make.  You will need to bring your own laptop for all of our R and Reproducible Research sessions.

For a full list of courses and a link to the booking system visit the student course catalogue or the staff course catalogue (you will need to follow a further link to get to the actual booking pages).

If you can’t attend any of the dates we are currently offering or there is no date available for the course you want, enrol on our Moodle course to be the first to be notified about any new sessions.

Don’t forget….

IT for IOE offer training in a wide range of digital tools including screencasting, blogging and Twitter, mind mapping and presentation tools, with some sessions specifically aimed at Mac users. You can also learn about text-to-speech software, how to make audio files from text and much more.  The summer schedule is already published and sessions will be available to book from 24 April.  Visit IT for IOE IT Course Booking for details.

We have a vast range of high-quality video-based courses available at Lynda.com. These cover technical skills but also business, personal and creative skills as well.  Visit the UCL Lynda.com page to find out more.  We also have a range of technology-focused online courses available from Microsoft Imagine Academy

Not sure what you need or have a more specific issue you would like help with?  Come along to one of the Digital Skills Development drop ins if you want more individual support.

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Dates are now available for courses in the second half of term.  For a full list and a link to the booking system visit the student course catalogue or the staff course catalogue (you will need to follow a further link to get to the actual booking pages).

As usual we also offer a wide range of courses covering Excel, Photoshop, RStudio, Matlab, LaTeX and more.  We also have a new SharePoint course for staff.

If you can’t find what you are looking for, we have a vast range of high-quality video-based courses available at Lynda.com.  Visit the UCL Lynda.com page to find out more.  You can also come along to one of Digital Skills Development drop ins if you want more individual support.

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Those who use Lynda.com may have noticed already that there have been some changes to the user interface and some exciting new features have been added.  The next time you log on you will be asked ‘What do you want to accomplish on Lynda.com?’ and guided through a range of options.

Once you have chosen some goals, these will be included in the Recommended section of your personalised profile.  You can go back to My Goals (on the drop-down menu under your name) to change your choices at any time.

Your Lynda.com home page has now been re-organised to make it more streamlined with courses you are currently watching (Continue Watching) and Your Playlist on the left and Popular Learning Paths and other highlighted courses on the right.  The courses section is now tabbed with New, Popular and Recommended sections.

If you aren’t familiar yet with Learning Paths, these are sets of courses written by industry experts designed to teach you the knowledge and skills to pursue a particular career or work towards a particular certification.

Finally, something to look forward to: there will soon be a ‘Popular at UCL‘ tab added so you will be able to see what other users here are enjoying!

Check out the new features in Lynda.com…

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A quick reminder that we still have plenty of places on our courses this term.  Dates are available up to and including Reading Week.

Visit the appropriate course catalogue (see below) to see a full list of all courses and then follow a further link to book from the currently available schedule.
Courses include data analysis using SPSS, Stata, Matlab or R with RStudio and coding in SQL or HTML and CSS.  We also cover many Excel features, document layout in Word and LaTeX, graphics editing with Photoshop and more.

We often come across people who have never heard about us so don’t forget to tell your friends and colleagues about our great range of free IT training!

Staff course catalogue: tinyurl.com/trainituclstaff
Student course catalogue: tinyurl.com/trainituclstudent

If you can’t find what you are looking for, don’t forget that we also offer a vast range of high quality video tutorials via Lynda.com: www.ucl.ac.uk/lynda

Further courses are available from the Institute of Education, including sessions looking at iPad apps, Prezi, blogging, wikis, digital notebooks, mind mapping, screen casting, Lynda.com,various web tools Keynote on a Mac (alternative to PowerPoint), Office 2016 applications and Mac OS Yosemite and Endnote.

Once confined to a few teaching enthusiasts and specific disciplines, over the last decade video, audio and interactive media have become an increasingly mainstream part of UCL’s academic repertoire.

Media has definitely become part of many of our students’ study processes.

Students consistently report that video content assists their learning, either as a revision tool or as a new way of engaging with material. Student demand for example has largely driven the growth of lecture capture. More broadly the success of Khan Academy video-based MOOCs and especially at UCL Lynda.com has helped digital video become recognised as a means to support high-quality academic learning. Key to this is integration with Moodle enabling any media to be enhanced by other online resources and support.

Media itself has become easier and cheaper to produce, edit, store and deliver, enabling both our academics and students to become producers with ‘media literacy’ is widely becoming identified as a valuable education and research asset.

Tony Slade and Clive Young from the ISD Learning, Teaching & Media Services team have been working on a project this year to develop a UCL Educational Media service. The research project investigates how and why lecturers use video and what their future video requirements are for successful student teaching. Interviews have been compiled with staff project examples to form case studies. An education producer, Mike Howarth was commissioned to produce the content for the research project

The team has have found widespread use of media to change the way we design programmes. Media seems to act as a catalyst enabling new blends of virtual learning and conventional delivery to create rich media and face-to-face learning experiences. ‘Flipping’ is also increasingly considered at UCL as a way to maximise the educational opportunity of face-to-face learning.

For examples of these ideas, follow the links below to six short video case studies on UCL’s T&L Portal.

• Dr Graham Roberts (UCL Computer Science) explains how creates his own videos “to capture core materials” and to build a library of reusable and accessible resources for his students (and himself).
• Professor Andrea Sella (UCL Chemistry) discusses the various ways in which creating his own teaching videos help him to “shake things up and make things different”
• Dr Andrew Cook (UCL Institute of Cardiovascular Science) discusses the way he uses video to ‘tell the story’ of heart morphology with video equipment and his technique which may have application in your area of teaching
• Dr Ema Muk-Pavic (UCL Mechanical Engineering) shares how using videos as a form of assessment has proved beneficial, time-saving and useful for both students and staff
• Matthew Wood-Hill (UCL Bartlett Development Planning Unit) describes how videos are being used to connect research and teaching as well as to take students “beyond just the books”
• Dr John Potter (UCL Institute of Education) talks about the value of learners being creators of media as well as consumers as it helps “bring subject matter alive and increases engagement”

As a bonus if you are asking yourself “Can using free online video tutorials through lynda.com enhance my teaching?” try this additional case study.

• Lasse Johansson (Course Tutor, Open City Docs School within UCL Anthropology) confirms the answer is “definitely”

You might have noticed a recent addition to the buttons on Lynda.com courses over the past week. This is a new feature that will allow you to view content offline on desktops via an application download. When you are viewing a course in Lynda – as opposed to a video or playlist – you will see a [View Offline] button above the video, as shown in the screenshot below. When you click on this you will be prompted to download the Desktop app for your computer system.

Download courses to watch offline on your desktop or laptop by following 3 simple steps:

1. Download the native Mac or Windows App ( by clicking ‘View Offline; on any Lynda.com course).
2. Login with just 1-click (this will check you are already logged in to Lynda.com via your web browser).
3. Select the ‘View Offline’ button on any Lynda.com course page to add courses to the Lynda.com Offline App.

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Once installed you can click the ‘1-click login’ and it will take you to Lynda.com in your web browser and you should then see a message saying “Successfully connected!” – providing you were still logged in to Lynda.com.

From the app you can easily add courses by clicking the [Add courses] button in the top, right corner of the page. This will open your web browser and take you to Lynda.com, where you can use the same [View offline] button you clicked before to install the software to add the software to your Lynda Offline App.

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You may need to allow your web browser to launch an external application (as shown below):

You can try this new offline viewing feature out for yourself on your computer.

To get started log in (with your UCL credentials) via www.ucl.ac.uk/lynda.